Feedly has become the new darling of the RSS world after Google threw itself out of the market last year, but there are still plenty of users (including yours truly) who aren't crazy about the Feedly app itself. Hopefully the changes shown off in the newest beta release will change that. You can check out the beta via the usual Google+ community method: join this community on Google+, then head to this page in the Play Store.

The biggest user-facing change is "speed reading," which is a bit of a misnomer - it's basically a forward/back function. Tap on the left or right side of an article near the edge of the screen and you'll automatically move to the next or last item in the RSS feed. This achieves the same thing as a left or right swipe, but with a tap instead (most ebook readers use both). Unfortunately the feature is rather inconsistent at the moment: it only works if you tap the very edge of the screen, and won't register if you happen to tap text or an image, which is all too easy with Feedly's formatting. There's no way to disable speed reading in the beta.

Perhaps even more important for regular users is the back button, which has been given some very specific attention. Now when you press Android's native back button in a story you'll go up to the feed view. Tap it again and you'll exit the app, just like most similar apps. Previously the back button behavior was erratic and sometimes didn't do anything at all. I'm pleased to report that this issue is working as advertised. The Feedly blog post mentions other bug fixes, including login expiration and Android 4.1 rendering issues.

Comments

Tawnya

I'm am still waiting for feedly to add/allow navigation in its browser mode. For instance, if you click a few links past the original article, when you press the back button (or try to swipe back), you are taken all the way back to the article instead of the last page viewed.

codemonkey85

I wish you could just use Chrome as the browser by default - instead I normally open the article in Chrome right off the bat, so I can follow links from there.

TOMMMMMM

This is why I simply browse feedly in chrome and request page as desktop. I did the same thing for when I used Google Reader as well. There isn't an app that handles opening multiple tabs from your feed in the browser better than the browser.

Yeah I wish they just improve the browser version for desktop & mobile browsers. Right now it does everything EXCEPT able to page through & browse articles quickly. Scrolling & auto-marking them read is inconsistent if I scroll too fast, it doesn't mark some articles as read. Wish there was just a quick pager on the browser version. The app is not needed since it doesn't require extra permissions or OS level features.

bobEveryman

So annoying! Especially if I'm reading one of those multi-page Ars Technica articles, pressing back goes all the way back to feedly!

feedly

Thanks for the feedback. Will look into this for the next iteration of the beta. -Edwin

I've long given up on the Feedly app (and am disappointed with the desktop web version as well).
Sounds like the back button is still not behaving properly in the beta, if it simply exits when you press it in a feed view of a specific feed or category.
I tried GReader, which was decent, and certainly a lot better, but I finally bit the bullet and bought Press, which is so much better than either of them. (They really should have a free trial version, I'd have switched long before if I just could have tried it without paying.)

Kesey

Not the same as a free trial, but you can always try out paid apps for 15 mins before you can no longer get a refund.

Pascal Welsch

I want to open articles in chrome with the "visit website" button. Tapping the overflow button and then tap the chrome icon is very annoying.

WebViews SUCK! You shouldn't use them. That's iOS style.

ookees

You can change your default sharing tool to the browser in settings which will give you a one touch access to using chrome. Downside is then your current sharing tool goes into overflow.

SetiroN

Who cares, inoreader FTW.
And if you want a more advanced android client, you can use news+ with it.

Rand Phillips

Agreed. I also much prefer InoReader and the News+ Android app.

ookees

I have no problems with the web version. Works great. The app could use some improvements in regards to the built in web browser and the ability to use the share button outside the menu overflow.

I'll give press a shot on Android. Any recommendations for and a better iOS app wth Feedly Sync.

Jayayess1190

I like Reeder and Mr. Reader on iOS.

Paito Anderson

I use Reeder (http://reederapp.com/ios/) for my iPad and iPhone, it's probably your best option there. I haven't tried Mr. Reader.

ken147

After the whole blog link hijacking kerfuffle I switched to Newsblur. News+ (from the makers of greader) has a newsblur plugin. A lot better than the official app.

Peacen1k

Feedly web version works just fine and doesn't require any plugins. For my phone the Feedly app crashes too often, gReader is still the best.

nvillaco

The one feature that haunts Feedly and pretty much every other RSS app is their reliance on Web View for viewing full articles. I remember when Kit Kat came out, one of the improvements was that Web View was now going to be powered by Chromium. This was huuuuge news to me because reading RSS is what I do most on a phone or tablet. Are their any RSS apps that already support this if using a device with Kit Kat? I don't have my Nexus 7 on me at the moment but I'm pretty sure Feedly still uses the old Web View?

feedly

This beta uses the Chrome Webview if you are using Kitkat.

nvillaco

Thanks for the reply. That's good to know and I'm definitely going to switch to the beta now because of that. I love Feedly but it's biggest problem is this, when some gif's or videos won't play correctly in the web view unless I share to chrome and exit the app completely. Chrome powered web view solves all of this.

feedly

Yes. Kitkat should be a step in the right direction. We are also looking at ways to better integrate with Chrome when the user wants to drill down into the website. More on this in v19.

Not really. Typically, when you hit the "back" button it takes you back a step. That's not annoying for me.

mesmorino

That's because you've gotten used to it. It's supposed to take you back a step, but its behaviour is frequently inconsistent across apps. Within apps it's much better, but by no means does it always do what it's supposed to do.

As an example, you say "Typically". Typically is not good enough, especially when you can't predict when it will or won't behave as it should (which is also different from it behaving as *expected*)

Alex

Have you never come across the issue where you click a link in one application and it loads in to Chrome, then you click back and instead it goes through all of the Chrome pages history rather than back to the app? i.e. it seems to have opened the link in an existing tab rather than a new one, so the tab has history.

The native back button works just fine for me too. Only a few apps use it badly. Biggest of them is Franco Kernel Updater, imo. It doesn't work like an up button. It works literally like a back button in Windows Explorer. It'll take you back to everything you had done before reaching that page.

The back button issue in this case was that the back button sometimes didn't do anything. You press it - nothing. Press again, and it exits.

feedly

Artem is right. There was a bug where if you where using back to close opened article, then you had to click N times on the close (where N = the number of articles read) before the app closed. That bug has been fixed. I am going to talk to the team about honoring "back should go back in the web view history before closing the article" behavior. That seems like the right thing to do. Thanks for the feedback. -Edwin

HR

Still needs offline reading.

Samuel Hart

Hmm, much as I love their web service I'll be sticking to Press for now.

Michael, thanks for the review. Note: we speed reading feature is designed for 7" and 10" tablets where there is mode room on the edge to tap and navigate between articles. There is also a preference knob to turn it off. -Edwin

Well, if it doesn't work well on phones, I think that'd be a good idea. I am not a fan of this anyway. I think swiping is a lot more natural and completely free of false positives.

feedly

Do you swipe a lot between articles? We have a lot of users who navigate through their feedly at this secondary level and they end up reading through 100+ articles - and complaining for sore thumbs. The feedback we got from those users have been off the chart. -Edwin